Eran has been developing and coding since the age of nine. Before co-founding monday.com, he was part of the leadership team at Conduit Mobile (now Como) where he managed R&D operations. Eran obtained a Bachelor of Science focused in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.

I connected with Eran Zinman to talk about people management, business lessons and new business name.

Tomas Laurinavicius: What’s your elevator pitch?

Eran Zinman:monday.com is a centralized platform for teams to manage every detail of their work, from high-level roadmap planning to the specifics of day-to-day tasks, while building a culture of transparency. It is a tool for any-sized team, which can start with two freelancers working together to thousands collaborating across the globe.

Laurinavicius:How did your first pitch deck look like?

Zinman:Wow! That feels like a lifetime ago. I think the tagline for our first pitch deck was “a new breed of company collaboration.” We were initially positioning ourselves as a project management solution for startups and development teams, the sort of teams my co-founder Roy and I were most familiar with. But then a bunch of breweries signed up. And then dozens of churches. Construction companies. Schools and universities. Fortune 500s, and even the Boston Celtics! We understood quickly that the challenges that monday.com solve are not restricted to tech companies, but are faced by any type of team, regardless of size, working together on just about anything. Let’s just say our pitch deck and taglines have evolved since then.

Laurinavicius:What is the essential problem you’re solving?

Zinman: At its core, monday.com is a tool to help people work better together. We often say that monday.com is not a project management tool because it isn’t projects that need managing, it’s people. People are any company’s most valuable resource and as people, we all face the same workplace challenges; communicating with others, not feeling appreciated or motivated to do our jobs, a lack of understanding of how our work fits into the bigger picture, among so many others. Those are the essential problems we’re trying to solve.

Laurinavicius:How did you get initial traction?

Zinman:We made an unusual marketing choice from the very beginning. Though our offering is technically a B2B solution, we have always marketed ourselves as a B2C. This helped us build traction really early and really fast. We targeted anyone who could implement the solution for their team directly through channels like Facebook and Instagram. From there, because the teams liked it so much and found monday.com so effective, it spread organically across those companies. We never aimed to be an enterprise-wide solution or relied on “top-down” implementation, but instead, focused on reaching the individual manager who was feeling the pains that our tool solved.

Laurinavicius:What is your unfair competitive advantage?

Zinman:We feel really lucky to have many unique advantages, but I can think of two that are essential to our success. First, we took a fundamentally different approach to project management. Instead of sticking to the traditional principles, which often restrict people to working in a certain way, our tool provides a malleable structure for teams to adapt to whatever their specific needs are. This is how we built such a diverse user base of teams, from both technology and non-technology sectors, that continue to impress us in the creative ways they use our tool.

We may not know how to manage a hotel or streamline a manufacturing process using monday.com, but they sure do! Another competitive advantage we possess is BigBrain, our internal business intelligence tool. Our success at monday.com relies on data. We’re obsessed with making the best tool we can to meet our clients’ needs, and that depends on measuring everything we do with precision and accuracy. BigBrain evaluates our every KPI and, in the spirit of transparency, we make these numbers accessible to everyone on our team. Because BigBrain tracks every cent that goes in and out of the company, the optimization of our marketing budget is maximized. With machine learning and data modeling, we’re able to do any kind of analysis on the data. And this has been an integral part of our rapid growth.

Laurinavicius:What were you doing before getting into the business?

Zinman:I built my first startup at the age of 14. Since then, I knew building companies from the ground up was what I wanted to do with my life. Though my first few startups ultimately failed, they were incredible learning experiences. From there, I worked at a large mobile company managing an R&D team. During my time there, Roy approached me to build what is known today as monday.com with him.

Laurinavicius:What is the most valuable lesson you learned?

Zinman:A super valuable lesson I learned is that when someone tells you you’re wrong, even if it’s someone you really respect, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong. You have to trust your gut. When building a company, many people will give you advice (solicited or otherwise) and insist that they know better. It’s important to take other opinions into consideration, but have faith in yourself always. And this doesn’t only apply to us.

We need to trust our employees too! At monday.com, we strongly believe in a work culture that supports failure. It’s important that our employees know that we have their back. We do our best to hire smart people and want them to try cool new ideas, even if there’s a risk. That’s the only way you can really grow.

Laurinavicius:What is the best decision you have ever made and why?

Zinman:That’s a tough question. I think the best business decision we made is to not have a sales team for our first few years. We were forced to build a product that sold itself. In not having a sales team, we were constantly engaging with our users and early adopters directly and incorporating their feedback right away. Once we reached 10,000 paying teams, we added an inbound sales team to help accounts grow, but the notion of listening closely to user feedback is still a core pillar of our company.

Laurinavicius:What is your biggest achievement so far?

Zinman:I just reflected on this recently, actually. Over the last month, we’ve been going through the transition of changing our name from dapulse to monday.com. This was one of the scariest decisions of my life, it still is! But going through the process only further emphasized to me that my greatest achievement, well professional achievement at least, is being a part of the monday.com team. Renaming to monday.com has been an all-encompassing journey that involved every part of our team, and it’s already paying off big time!

We finally have a name that people can remember, that has a strong affiliation with work, and that sparks a dialogue on the challenges people have when working together. Changing our name has already improved our brand equity and boosted our numbers, and I am so proud of how we executed together as a team. I feel really privileged to do the work we’re doing and that’s a really exciting place to be.

Updated: after publishing the story, I've been asked to update the headline and change it from Monday to Monday.com.

Tomas Laurinavicius is a lifestyle entrepreneur and blogger. Join Life Designed, his weekly lifestyle design newsletter.

I write about the importance of design in business and life, technology, unconventional lifestyle and entrepreneurship. I'm a lifestyle entrepreneur and blogger from Lithuania. I travel the world with a mission to empower 1 million people to change their lifestyle for good.